Saturday, May 16, 2015

"The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839)
is, in many ways, the complete Poe paradigm because it pulls together so many
of his basic themes and embodies so many of his innovative techniques. As usual, the major controversy which has
been carried on about the story centers on the ontological nature of the
events--either that Roderick is mad or the narrator is mad, although
significant discussions of the story's allegorical embodiment of the ideas
presented in Eureka have also been written. One important technique Poe uses in the story
is to separate his central protagonist, the embodiment of obsession and desire,
from his observing self, much the way he did by introducing a secondary
narrator for the Dupin stories. The
story begins with the entrance of the narrator into the world of Usher, which
is the world of the story itself. The
landscape he enters which surrounds the house--the "rank sedges,"
"the white trunks of decayed trees," the "singularly dreary
tract of country"--are archetypal oneiric images found in Turgenev's "Brezhin
Meadow" and Conrad's "Heart of Darkness."

However, it is the house itself that
causes the narrator, and the reader, the first "reading"
difficulties: "I know not how it
was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom
pervaded my spirit." He himself
poses the hermeneutical questions: "what was it that so unnerved me in the
contemplation of the House of Usher? It
was a mystery all insoluble." The narrator knows that there are combinations
of natural objects which have the power of affecting one in such a way, but he
knows that the "analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond
our depth." He considers that maybe
a "different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details
of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its
capacity for sorrowful impression."
Thus he tries the experiment of looking at the house from the
perspective of its reflection in the tarn, but the inverted reflected image,
much like a distorted image in one of Poe's own stories, gives him a shudder
more thrilling than the house itself.

It is one of the most famous openings in all of
literature, for the narrator simulates the process by which the reader enters
into the patterned reality of the art work, obviously affected but puzzled as
to what could have created such an effect.
Looking into the tarn deepens what the narrator calls his superstition,
for when he lifts his eyes to the house itself, he seems to perceive "that
about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to
themselves and their immediate vicinity--an atmosphere that had no affinity
with the air of heaven." Indeed, what he has perceived is what short-story
writers such as Eudora Welty and Elizabeth Bowen have called the
"atmosphere" of the story--something intangible, for which Poe
reserves the term "mystic," given off like a "story glow,"
which Marlowe describes in "Heart of Darkness."

Although the narrator tries to shake off this
dream-like sense and observe "the real aspect of the building," he
notes a further fact about its construction that points to its reality as an
aesthetic object. No portion of the
masonry has fallen, but "there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between
its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the
individual stones." The only other
element of the building's "instability" is a fissure which runs from
the roof to the base of the house in the tarn.
Indeed, the instability of the house is like the instability of the art
work itself, which gains life not because of its parts but because of its
structure, but which in turn always carries within itself the means of its own
deconstruction.

The narrator cannot connect Roderick with any idea
of "simple humanity" because he is what W. H. Auden has called a
unitary state, an embodiment of desire.
Like the House, there is an "inconsistency about Usher, an
"incoherence," a sense that the parts do not fit together. Usher suffers from a disease characterized by
an unusual attentiveness or focus, what the narrator calls "a morbid
acuteness of the senses." He finds
all but the most bland food intolerable, can wear garments of only certain
textures, finds the odors of flowers oppressive, cannot bear anything but the
faintest light, and cannot listen to anything but some peculiar sounds from
stringed instruments. It is clear that
Roderick is the artist who cannot tolerate any sensory input at all, has indeed
cut himself from any stimulus from the external world, much as Prince Prospero
wishes to do in "The Masque of the Red Death."

Usher's fear is of no particular thing, as indeed it
could not be, for he embodies that fear of ultimate nothingness faced by the
protagonist in "The Pit and the Pendulum." It is not a plausible psychological fear, but
a fear that can only be understood in aesthetic terms. His obsession centers on a family
superstition about the relationship between the house and the self, in which
the house affects his spirit--"an effect which the physique of the
gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down,
had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence."
And this superstitious fear is complicated by the shadowy existence of Madeline,
his sister, a figure the narrator regards with the same unspeakable dread with
which he regarded the house, for both house and sister represent Roderick's own
inherently flawed and detested physicality.

Although we know little about Roderick, we do know
that he is an artist: he paints, he improvises on the guitar, and he writes
poetry. His work is characterized by
what the narrator calls a "highly distempered ideality" which throws
a "sulphurous lustre over all."
Of his paintings, the narrator says, "if ever mortal painted an
idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher."
Concerned only with the purest of abstraction, with no relation to
objects in the world, Roderick's paintings are hermetically sealed, like the
one painting the narrator describes of a rectangular vault or tunnel under the
earth with no outlet and no artificial light, yet which still is bathed in
intense rays.

Usher's poem
aesthetically mirrors the story itself because it identifies the haunted palace
of art with the person of Usher, complete with images of eyes as windows and
pearl and ruby as teeth and lips at the door.
The poem reflects the underlying motivation of the story which so haunts
Roderick--that of the "sentience of vegetable things," an obsession
which Usher pushes to the extreme theory of the "kingdom of
inorganization," that is, the sentience of the structure of non-living
things, specifically the house itself, "fulfilled in the method of
collocation of these stones--in the order of their arrangement.... Its
evidence--the evidence of the sentience--was to be seen, he said (and I here
started as he spoke), in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere
of their own about the waters and the walls. A crucial statement about the
aesthetic pattern being the source of sentience, the passage reminds us that as
an artist, Roderick has cut himself off from any external sensory source for
his art; thus all that he has left to feed on is himself. This is a story about the ultimate romantic
artist who, like Kafka's hunger artist, devours himself.

when the narrator reads to Roderick a romance
entitled the "Mad Trist," sounds described in the fiction are echoed
in Roderick and the narrator's own fictional world. The shriek of the dragon in the "Mad
Trist" is echoed by a shriek in "The Fall of the House of
Usher," as is the terrible ringing sound of the romance hero's
shield. This is what Jean Ricardou has
called the mise en abyme in the story--that point in which the story
refers self-reflexively to its own structure. "It is by the microscopic
revelation of the total narrative, therefore, that the mise en abyme challenges
the preliminary order of the story. A
prophecy, it disturbs the future by revealing it before its end, by anticipation." It is an example of Poe's revealing the
spatial nature of the story in the midst of its temporal unravelling, for in
spite of the fact that it seems to be "continuing," it is already
complete.

This interface between fiction and reality brings
the story to its climax when the doors swing open and Madeline, with a moaning
cry falls inward upon Usher and, like falling cards, he falls to the floor, and
the house falls into the tarn. The
instability of the house, the fissure that splits it, widens, and the story
deconstructs just as the house does, as everything collapses back into
unformulated pre-creation nothingness and the tale ends on the italicized words
of its own title.

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Tenth Anniversary of My Blog

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Click cover to go to Amazon and read the Introduction and first chapter.

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